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As ever, we can lose sight of what’s important in SAM, especially if we are chasing a rapid implementation to generate ELP’s for a collection of vendors we fear will knock on the door at a moment’s notice.

If your company is still at that point where a SAM tool is some way away, but you wish to do something that could help the mid to long term SAM situation, then a strategic approach could be adopted at the point of a software contract negotiation

A client I was recently working with talked about how they managed their software contracts; specifically, at the point of negotiation they would seek to customise the terms and conditions of the contract in their favour – nothing new in that per say; but the forward-thinking approach in contract customisation was more steered towards having one-eye on future audits. If the terms and conditions can be adequately customised, then there is a chance of off-setting the potential pain of a future audit. Not to the point where we look to sabotage a vendor audit, but rather where audits become non-standard.

Non-standard audits require a software vendor to deviate from their accepted protocols, and so may relegate a client to an “exception bucket” to be managed at another time. Additionally, the personnel re-drafting a software contract will invariably be different from the people who would conduct an audit in x years’ time – there’s more than a fair chance that those bespoke terms and conditions will not have gone through any sort of knowledge transfer from one department to the next.

This is proactive SAM in action – but a word of warning; not unlike the software vendor, the client ALSO has to ensure that knowledge-transfer of those bespoke terms and conditions takes place over the life of the software contract – otherwise such customisations could be for nothing.

Rory has a wide range of first-hand experience advising numerous companies and organisations on the best practices and principles pertaining to software asset management. This experience has been gained in both military and civil organisations, including the Royal Navy, Compaq, HP, the Federation Against Software Theft (FAST) and several software vendors.